Chamber and committees

As I understand it, that reduction relates to a demand-led budget line in the main. It is to do with initial teacher education places that were not filled—there was an oversupply of places this year. That calculation is set out by the SFC, I think. That is where that reduction has come from, so there should not be an adverse impact in that regard. Those places were simply not filled.

That showed that most pupils were enjoying being back at school and the stability that it brought, which was heartening to see.

We want our young people to enjoy coming to school, and we do not want them to be anxious about going out into the world without those supports. It is a responsibility for all of us. Teachers should—and do—support their young people in relation to their wellbeing, but, more broadly, we need to consider anxiety in our response to changes to behaviour and how we can offer better support.

I do not know whether Clare wants to say more on that.

Do you mean the current model?

He did bring a spreadsheet. I think that he was a friend of Iain Gray, so I was suspicious of him. [Laughter.] Anyway, I will set that aside.

At that point in 2018-19, we already had the evidence that talked about the number of subjects reducing in S4, the counter-argument to which would be that we now have a broader curriculum up to the end of S3. I will go back to the point that I made to Willie Rennie, who asked me what was wrong with Scottish education. Nothing is wrong with it, and we have a strong education system, but we did not fix the break between the BGE and the senior phase. That is part of the challenge in relation to course choice, because it is about practical delivery. Therefore, in my response to Professor Hayward’s review, I am thinking very carefully about how that will work in schools.

When Ms Maguire and I were at school, pupils would sit maybe seven or eight standard grades. In some schools, pupils would sit nine, but, across the country, the number was in the region of seven or eight. Now, you could walk into a school down the road and pupils might be sitting for five qualifications, but another school might have adhered to the traditional two-plus-two-plus-two model and not have moved much away from the theory of thinking about the curriculum, because that school wants to stick to the point, which Ms Maguire made, about performativity and believes that that is the best way to deliver results for our young people. There is a challenge in that, which goes back to the points that I made about whether we have a prescriptive curriculum with regard to entitlements.

However, I think that part of the response to curriculum changes and updating and responding to some of the curriculum improvement cycle work has to address the gap between the BGE and the senior phase. If I can be really niche-orientated, given that I had to write a timetable in a previous life, the hours that the SQA currently ascribes to national qualifications mean that schools cannot timetable more than—I think, but Mr Greer will keep me right—five subjects in S4 unless they start the delivery of the national qualifications in S3, which breaks the BGE. We need to have an answer to that.

Most schools start to deliver their national qualification subjects a bit earlier, in S3, to account for the delivery associated with the qualification. However, our new qualifications organisation must talk to the folk who write timetables in schools. In the past, there has been a disconnect—never the two shall meet. We need to think about the practicalities. If we unpick the qualifications, those are the things to which teachers will be responding. On Ms Maguire’s point about S4 entries, that is how we try to provide a bit more equality across the provision. That relates to Professor Hayward’s challenge around entitlements.

Through reform, there is the opportunity to fix some of the challenges in the system without necessarily unpicking all of it. That will involve fixing where we get to between the broad general education and the implementation of the senior phase. There are lots of ways in which we can avoid the two-term dash, as it is often referred to. We can deliver qualifications across two years, as many schools already do because they think that that delivers better outcomes for their young people. That will move us away from a system that involves three years of exams. As the committee will know, because it will have taken evidence on this, we like a test in Scotland. There is an argument that we need to broaden what constitutes assessment and how we measure outcomes for young people.

I am not sighted on the specifics of the City of Edinburgh Council. I think that the committee took evidence from Peter Bain of School Leaders Scotland on that, and SLS has previously raised with me the devolved school management challenge. I will take a look at the specifics in relation to the City of Edinburgh Council. The convener and I are having a meeting on a separate issue so, in that meeting, we could perhaps update her on any engagement that officials have had with Edinburgh council.

I should say that that is not my local paper.

I thank Mr Kidd for his question, which raises an important point. We have a new deal with local government through the Verity house agreement arrangements. As the committee will be aware, some of the budget settlement looks to remove a level of ring fencing. There are two budget lines from which we remove ring fencing, and they are already baselined into the grant for local government. They will be contained within that but come from my budget. Additional lines come from me directly, which are more ring fenced, although they are quite a small proportion—around 5 per cent overall. Therefore, other than that 5 per cent, local authorities have some flexibility in relation to how they spend.

Through the Verity house agreement, I was keen to establish a quality assurance framework between us and local authorities. We have been working on that since this summer. In August, we began engagements with COSLA. I meet COSLA very regularly—every two or three weeks—and I am keen that we deliver on a change in that relationship not just through Verity house but through accountability. I might argue that, as cabinet secretary, I am hyper-accountable to the committee, the chamber and the media, but education is delivered by local authorities, and they retain statutory responsibility for that.

When we look—as I do—at the performance in last year’s exam results, we see that there is variability in the system, and we need to tackle it with regard to outcomes. That is how we close the poverty-related attainment gap, and we need to drill into some of that. At Education Scotland, we have a team of attainment advisers—with whom the committee will be familiar—who support every local authority in trying to close the gap. Part of that work has been driven by local authorities identifying their stretch aims, which involves forward planning and saying, “In three years’ time, this is the progress that we will have made in closing the gap.” Education Scotland is involved in challenging and also supporting local authorities. That speaks to Mr Kidd’s question about improvement and delivery. We need to get into a better space that recognises that local authorities have responsibility for that.

As far as improvement is concerned, whether it is in behaviour, attendance or curriculum, local authorities have a real responsibility. Some of them take that extremely seriously and they have really good support mechanisms in place, such as quality improvement officers. I want to work with local authorities to support them to deliver that.

Part of the improvement will be supported by the appointment of the new chief inspector. I do not want to jump ahead, because we will talk about reform in the next session. The interim chief inspector has a key role to play in supporting local authorities with improvement and has powers to carry out their own inspections of local authority improvement mechanisms and how they work to support schools. I know that some people in the system say that that is a starting point for the new chief inspector. I am sure that she currently has her hands full with a few other things that I have sent her way, but I think that we should look at how central Government supports the improvement function at local authority level, because there are 32 different approaches to it around the country. Sometimes that difference is a strength of the Scottish education system, but sometimes we are not great at learning from other areas where there are pockets of good practice. That is where Education Scotland and the attainment advisers have a key role to play.

That is helpful, and it is correct to recognise that we are going back to the situation that existed prior to the pandemic. We should be mindful that the education system has been through a period of turmoil in relation to Covid. That additionality was built into the system, much in the same way that, post-pandemic, we have now gone back to holding examinations in schools. Things are different. When we try to baseline or measure things against the year that came prior to there being additional places in the system, I do not think that gives an accurate depiction, much like when we try to compare the attainment gap with that which existed last year or the year prior to that, because we had different arrangements in place for those years.

Ms Thomson is absolutely accurate and correct in her assessment that comparing those numbers with 2019 gives a better overall understanding of the progress that we are making in relation to student places.

I do not think that it is something that has happened since 2016.

Michelle Thomson has raised a hugely important point, particularly in the light of the challenges that the Government faces—which are well known to the committee—in relation to the Deputy First Minister’s update to Parliament at the end of last year. My portfolio is not insulated from those challenges.

We have worked hard to protect the education budget as best we can. My understanding of the public sector reform that is needed is that all organisations need to play a role—that all our public sector bodies will have to play their part. We need to take a nuanced approach to that, mindful of the fact that that will be easier for some public bodies than for others, given the services that they deliver. I am acutely mindful of that, given some of my responsibilities to those organisations—for example, our qualifications organisation—and the services that they deliver.

Michelle Thomson touched on education reform. Following discussion of the budget, we will go on to a session on that very issue. I am mindful of the need to support education reform, which is why the budget contains additionality—of just over £12 million, I think—to support the reform process. However, I accept that we will need to work very carefully with those organisations.

At the end of last year, the Deputy First Minister set out that there will be a 10-year plan and that we will look across Government to reduce spend—to be blunt—and to see where there are efficiencies to be made across the piece. All organisations will have to be part of that drive, but, to refer to Michelle Thomson’s specific point, we will have to take a nuanced approach. The way in which the budget has been delivered takes such an approach. It protects certain services, such as health and education, through the three-missions approach. I will seek to do that through reforming the public bodies in the education and skills portfolio while remembering the impact that education can have. It is not just about the spend in relation to education itself; it is also about preventative spend, which can benefit other portfolio areas.